The UN’s human trafficking protocol is the linchpin of the global antislavery governance network. It drew on a series of early twentieth-century international treaties directed at the problem of ‘white slavery’ – European women being procured to work as prostitutes. Designed to accommodate disagreements over the relationship between prostitution and human trafficking, the protocol’s definition of human trafficking produced legal instability. The chapter traces the expansion of human trafficking policy from a state-centred focus on using the criminal law to target international sex traffickers to include an ensemble of private and public actors who advocate supply chain transparency legislation and bans on the importation goods made with forced labour. Concentrating on UN-related organisations and the US government, it investigates this shift and its implications for how unfree labour is governed. The chapter demonstrates how the legal assemblage of jurisdiction kept highly gendered governance strategies from clashing.

That bit on the ‘messy map’, the corner around Kalimpong, has been on edge in more senses than one. During the Doklam crisis of 2017, as China and India faced off against each other, the tension of a looming skirmish—if not full-scale war—radiated through this junction between China, Nepal, Bhutan and the former Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. This tense dynamic rumbled over into a replay in the Galwan Valley standoff in May–July 2020, as skirmishes were also reported during July–August on the border between Sikkim and China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

Anxieties flared up in Kalimpong. Kalimpong, after all, is a privileged prism, a unique entry point for looking not only at the India and China undercurrents but also at China in India. This introductory chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow in this book. While the events covered in them start in the 1910s but are mainly between the 1940s and early 1960s, this overture attempts to corroborate the longer history of how Kalimpong was intimately connected to the northeastern border leading into Tibet and China. This history is largely inaugurated by British frontier anxiety as well as the lure that Tibet as a ‘forbidden’ land held for the colonial imaginaire in its singular way of living, seeing and making of the world. Thus, the ‘opening’ of Kalimpong along with the ‘opening’ of Tibet is recounted in this chapter, first in the section on frontiers and Lord Curzon (1859–1925) and then in the section on survey, settlement and Charles Bell (1870–1945).

Chapter 5 is comparative in nature and explores the enactment of legislation in two federal polities, namely the United States and Germany. The objective of this chapter is to highlight that while national legislative processes are dominated by party politics, the European legislative process is dominated by trilogues – to some extent, trilogues make up for the absence of a genuine party system at EU level. It is within and between political parties and trilogues, respectively, that positions are discussed, coalitions cemented, institutional interdependences managed, political differences solved, and compromise brokered. When legislative files eventually reach the floor of the competent legislative institutions, their fate is – most of the time – already sealed. This chapter aims at highlighting that leaving legislative and interchamber coordination to party structures is no more – and possibly less – democratically accountable than entrusting it to trilogues, especially in times of strong partisanship and grand coalitions.

Robert Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn’s vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Wedderburn’s influence was documented in Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, A Peep in the London Tavern, which depicted him challenging the proto-socialist Robert Owen. After a review of existing scholarship that places Wedderburn within ultraradical circles or focuses on his mixed-race identity, the Introduction argues that understanding Wedderburn’s advocacy for land-based insurrection requires dialogue with scholarship in Black geographies. Wedderburn’s insights about place-based resistance to slavery are then illustrated in a reading of James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.

Physicalism was a logical development of fourth-century theology, but the fifth-century triumph of the creationist ensoulment model had the effect of making physicalist soteriology a much less useful theological tool by narrowing the possible physicalist effects of the incarnation to the body only (and not the soul). The disappearance of physicalism is one manifestation of the detrimental effect the creationist ensoulment model had on theological conceptions of human solidarity through its sharp division between body and soul that rendered “human nature” a category that no longer had logical relevance as regards articulations of fall or redemption. The renewed interest in both human solidarity and “human nature” as a meaningful soteriological category – manifest most clearly in the current explosion of interest in deification studies – emphasizes the need for a new curation of the Christian tradition that would both restore the category of human nature to soteriological usefulness and would recognize physicalist soteriology as a historical reality that should be evaluated for its possible utility to contemporary needs.

Chile’s regulation of fake news dates back nearly a century. The initial instance occurred in 1925 during a constitutional crisis that resulted in the drafting of a new constitution. At that time, a de facto government issued a decree making it illegal to publish and distribute fake news. The second regulatory milestone occurred during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet with the inclusion of provisions related to defamation in the 1980 constitution. Defamation involved spreading false information through mass media to unjustly tarnish someone’s reputation. Upon the restoration of democracy in Chile in 1990, these stipulations were permanently abolished from the legal system. Since 2001, the judicial pursuit of disinformation in Chile has been limited to exceptional means such as the State Security Law or, indirectly, through the right to rectification.

This chapter opens a series of chapters with case studies on France, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Poland. The institution of French laïcité is commonly understood as referring to a strict separation of church and state. This chapter explains how laïcité has become entangled in the pseudo-constitutional notion of vivre ensemble and the rising significance of social norms for the substantiation of the legal concept of l’ordre public. This is inferred from two particular expressions of constitutional intolerance: first, the overly general and restrictive prohibition of the full-face veil in public spaces, which culminated in the S.A.S. v. France case. Second, it details the expansion of the legal concept of laïcité as expressed in the 2021 Law Concerning the Respect for the Principles of the Republic, which exercises extensive control over the organisation of religious institutions, sources of funding, and their political loyalty to the Republic.

The European Union adopted region-wide binding legal norms and a multifaceted legal approach to human trafficking. This chapter explains that the EU has competence (legal authority or jurisdiction) over human trafficking because trafficking is seen as a crime that moves across borders. By contrast, the EU needs another source of competence to tackle forced labour in supply chains. These different sources of competence over different drivers of unfree labour resulted in a proliferation of gendered governance strategies. Pushed by the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, the EU incorporated the rights of trafficking victims. The chapter illustrates how victim’s rights were subsumed under the EU’s primary goal of hardening Member States’ borders against undesirable outsiders, exemplified by migrant sex workers. The EU also promoted a corporate sustainability due-diligence directive and a product ban targeting unfree labour in supply chains, thereby extending EU values beyond Member States’ borders.

Karima's Wedding

Preparations for Karima's wedding to Hossain were under way. It was Thursday afternoon in April 2018 and the narrow alleyway in this part of the Balukhali camp – 2 miles away from the entrance of the camp – was teeming with life and excitement. The wedding was only a few hours away, baad ‘Asr (after the late afternoon prayer). Eighteen-year-old Karima was in her shelter with her future sister-in-law, niece, and other relatives who had gathered to watch the bride prepare for her big day. Strings of artificial orange and pink flowers hung all around the room. Karima's hands had decorative floral patterns inked in mehndi (henna) the night before, and she sat patiently as her sister-in-law applied makeup and lipstick. A strikingly red scarf was adorned on her head and also covered some of her face. As I headed outside to see what the men were up to during this time, I noticed two young girls peeking their heads and giggling through the door of Karima's shelter. I stopped to chat with them and inquired what they thought of the wedding taking place. ‘Did you know they met in the camp?! How lucky she is!’, one of the girls exclaimed, covering her mouth as she giggled. Karima's male relative, who was walking by, shouted at the girls upon hearing them: ‘Hey! Speak quietly about these things!’. The girls hid their faces with their scarves and quickly darted off.

Outside the shelter, the men of Karima's family and community gathered around the huzur (local religious leader), who sat with Karima's father and uncles to negotiate the mahr (Islamic gift to the bride from the groom) and dowry (from the bride to the groom). The majhee was also present to ensure that everything was running smoothly. After a few minutes of back-and-forth between the male relatives of the bride and groom, the atmosphere started getting tense. The discussion became increasingly dotted with minor shouting outbursts as both sides made demands about the marriage. At one point, Karima's father shouted: ‘Nothing has happened with her and Hossain! My daughter is pure and no zulm has ever happened to her.

Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.

This chapter analyzes Schopenhauer’s political beliefs in the context of his biography. Schopenhauer was a well-traveled son of a merchant who failed to gain a foothold in academia and never pursued another career in the professions, business, or government. Without traditional prospects, he settled into a rentier existence. He retained much of his background’s bourgeois attitudes toward property, individual industry, and frugality, but since he was confined to a life outside professional circles, he came to occupy an outsider position and opposed both conservatives and progressives, orthodox Christians and secular radicals. Committed to the idea of a natural intellectual elite, he was skeptical of collective political movements, such as the nationalism and socialism of his own time. Yet he was also critical of the traditional aristocracy with its relative independence from the modern state. His preferred political regime was a nondemocratic, monarchical statism that would protect individuals and their property.